


Blinded By The Lights

by Merixcil



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Dry Humping, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, dead bodies, fight fight fight, this is a gratuitous sexually charged fight scene tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-12
Updated: 2017-04-12
Packaged: 2018-10-18 04:10:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10609005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merixcil/pseuds/Merixcil
Summary: By the time the explosion hits, Bruce is so tense from the waiting that the deafening crack of concrete below his feet almost comes as a relief.





	

By the time the explosion hits, Bruce is so tense from the waiting that the deafening crack of concrete below his feet almost comes as a relief. He fumbles with the grappling gun at his hip as the force of the blast pushes him backwards. If he didn’t have so much practice at this he’d be turning summersaults through the air right about now, even with his résumé it’s an effort to stay standing.

It’s counterintuitive to hold your mouth open during a blast of that magnitude and despite years of carefully training himself to do anything but, Bruce grits his teeth as he tries to maintain his balance. He glances over his shoulder and sees a drain poking out of the third floor of a building thirty feet away. Whether or not it’s sturdy enough to take his weight is difficult to say, but he doesn’t much fancy losing his footing and letting the residual expansion of compressed air send him flying. The cowl is specially reinforced to handle heavy impact, but that doesn’t make it fool proof. There have been nights when Bruce has lost his quarry because he hit the ground too hard and was knocked unconscious. The worst thing is waking up and realising all the ways he could have avoided it, but the nausea and dizziness of a concussion are never pleasant either.

Bruce’s fingers close over the handle of the grappling gun, and without pausing to consider the possibility that the drain isn’t going to hold him, he fires. With his eyes still smarting from the explosion, he can’t make out whether or not the rope is flying straight. He considers the effects of heat and blast-wind on his aim and for a moment, his stomach drops. There’s a reasonable chance he’s miscalculated this one.

The metal of the hook itself is more easily tracked than the rope. There’s enough light coming from the burning building down the street that it shines when it hits its target. Bruce can’t be sure if he adjusted his aim on instinct or if he’s forgotten taking extenuating factors into consideration in all the confusion, but the hook loops neatly around the drain and sits winking at him in the flickering light, ready for him to do what needs to be done.

Now almost at the same latitude as the drain, Bruce hits the button to recall the hook and revels in the familiar sensation of the ground being swept out from under him altogether as he flies through the air. The drain doesn’t hold perfectly, but Bruce has got a pretty decent handhold on a windowsill before it falls away altogether.

He looks back the way he’s come, sees plumes of fire still erupting from the old apartment block that had been at the epicentre of the blast. That particular building had been abandoned, but the explosion is strong enough to force the collapse of at least three other buildings almost instantaneously, and the flames are going to spread soon enough. His ears are ringing and probably will be for at least the next ten minutes, but when he looks down Bruce can see people running from their homes, mouths agape in what are most likely screams. He sincerely hopes that there are sirens in the distance, though how long it will take them to get here is anyone’s guess.

The building Bruce is hanging from is five stories tall, and he’s dangling from a third story window. Now the worst part of the explosion is over, it would be faster to drop to the ground and return to the scene on foot, but the volume of people moving in the other direction and the quantity of ground level detritus would only slow him down. It’s fastest, he decides, to go over the rooftops.

The climb is not particularly strenuous but moving up vertical buildings without his adhesive boots is always fiddly. It takes Bruce longer than he would like to reach the lip of the building and land on the roof. From there though, it’s pretty easy. The grappling hook takes all the uncertainty out of leaps between buildings and he’s always been fast in a sprint. He moves back towards the site of the explosion, feeling the heat rising with every step. The boiling mass of chemical flame has quieted into a block sized bonfire that’s tearing at the corners of its neighbours.

By the third rooftop, Bruce is no longer certain of the structural integrity of the buildings he’s standing on. He pauses, peers down onto the street and sees people barging each other out of the way in their haste to get as far away from their crumbling home as possible. The doorway vomits people on to the street, but no one’s standing around screaming about family members still inside or little old ladies with limited motor functions stuck on the fifth floor. Bruce doesn’t need to pause here, there will be people trapped by the rubble and the fire further down the street in far greater danger.

All the same, he can’t stay high. He’s pretty sure he could get himself away from a collapsing building without suffering too much in the way of damages, but it’s a chance he’d rather not take. Bruce allows himself a moment to assess the ground below for suitable landing spots, then leaps from the roof, his cape spreading out around him to slow his fall.

This time instinct or last minute maths doesn’t come to his rescue. Bruce has travelled a good fifty meters without making landfall before he remembers the thermal qualities of the air this close to a fire will carry him a lot further than on a typical Gotham night. He decides to use it to his advantage, staying airborne until he’s no more than a hundred meters away from the fire, furling his wings and dropping down onto an upturned car.

At this distance he’s sweating like a pig under his cowl and armour. He always forgets how much slower he operates in largescale fires. Maybe when this is done he’ll go speak to Lucius about getting a better cooling system installed in the suit.

The first priority is to ensure that anyone who might have survived the blast is moved out of the burning buildings. Bruce doesn’t bother with the apartment block at the nexus of the explosion, there hadn’t been anyone inside to trap. The flames are high enough around it to conceal the hard edges of the building but he had been watching when the bomb went off. The whole thing had collapsed in on itself before a secondary explosion sent rubble cascading across the street. When the fire department arrive they’re going to have a job getting close enough to the wreckage to put the fire out. A combination of heat and fallen debris has damaged the road a good two hundred meters back before the mountain of smashed brick and concrete can even be contended with.

When they do put the fire out, Bruce is going to be watching the police explosives report like a hawk. He’s spent the best part of the last two days stalking the area in the wake of abnormally high traffic from Joker enthusiasts and sympathisers. Sometimes they all start banding together of their own accord, which is rarely much of an issue, but something about this had set his teeth on edge. Bruce doesn’t for a moment believe that The Joker is connected to the supernatural, so he has to attribute his high sensitivity to the man’s chaos to a sixth sense developed through years of trying to keep up with him.

He has seconds at most to decide which building to enter first. All around him, the block is in varying states of combustion and collapse. In the end, he chooses the apartment block to the left of the blast site because the way it appears to be sagging under its own weight puts it at a higher risk of falling apart.

Through the front door, up two flights of stairs before he reaches a corridor. Bruce draws breath and tastes smoke on the back of his tongue, pausing to put on the gas mask in his utility belt.

Bruce pulls the mask over his mouth as he starts down the corridor, pushing the doors in one by one. They’re barely more than plywood, covering the holes into people’s homes, if homes is what they are. Each room looks lived in, with beds and camp stoves set up. A few even have books or a TV tucked away in the corner, but even after turning the scant furniture upside down, Bruce finds nothing and no one. It looks like a recently vacated squat, which could just be good luck but he sincerely doubts it. He had been in this building the night before and hadn’t seen anyone, but had attributed that to the lateness of the hour as much as anything. He had been scanning for explosives, because he’d had a feeling that that was how it was going to start this time round, but the sensors he uses for plastic explosives, gasoline and nitro glycerine don’t pick up warm bodies.

He’s spent far too much time listening to Alfred and Lucius, all their not so subtle remarks about how spying on people who haven’t committed a crime and who aren’t suspected of committing a crime is somehow wrong. Bruce doesn’t bother arguing with them, because they always win, but that doesn’t mean he thinks their right.

Moving on to the second floor, Bruce has to grab the walls to stop himself falling when the building lurches under his feet. He needs to work faster than this. If he remembers correctly, there are two more floors of living space, followed by three open plan floors that were empty when he was here the previous night. He had searched every nook and cranny of those big empty rooms, looking beyond heat signatures and chemical make up to slight changes in colour on the yellowing walls. Clearly he was looking in the wrong place but he’s already kicking himself for not looking hard enough. He missed something, and it’s cost the city dearly.

The second floor is much the same as the first, as the third floor would appear to be until Bruce reaches the last door on the left. The other apartments hang open, their meagre contents laid bare, but when he raises his hand to force open the final door, he feels something like electricity crawling up his spine.

The worst thing about The Joker is not how he always manages to do the unexpected, it’s how depressingly predictable all of Bruce’s failings against him are. He doesn’t need to open the door to know what lies beyond it, but he does it anyway, to remind himself that he’s got to be better than this.

There must be seventy bodies or more in the last apartment, piled up in the centre so that those on the bottom have had their bones broken post mortem by the pressure. What light there is in the room is coming through the window from the fire beyond, casting their faces in an eerie glow that highlights every sharp angle of every face. All of them have been caught with the same death mask: the wide eyes, the mouths stretched wider than human muscles should be able to go. They are grinning death, one last laugh and the terrible joke that Bruce, that Batman, couldn’t save them.

The building rocks again, and a large chunk of ceiling falls, missing Bruce’s head by inches. If he doesn’t want to be knocked unconscious outside, he really doesn’t want to be knocked unconscious in here. The part of him that knows when The Joker’s up to something and that knows when The Joker has stacked dead bodies up just for him to find is aware that there’s nothing else of interest in this building. Without another moment’s hesitation, Bruce dashes for the closest open door on the other side of the corridor, pulls his grappling gun from his hip and fires it at the window to break the glass. He recalls the hook and jumps through the space cleared, this time consciously taking advantage of the strange heat patterns caused by the fire to glide neatly over to the other side of the street and touch down.

By the time he’s straightened up, the unmistakable sound of brick grinding over brick has struck up in earnest, and Bruce turns to see the building he had been in not a minute earlier begin to collapse in on itself. The mask protects him from the dust, and the rubble doesn’t travel so far when it’s not being pushed by an explosion, but he flinches nonetheless, drawing his cape up over his head to shield himself from whatever he thinks is going to come flying at him.

Bruce looks over the lip of the cape and sees the dust beginning to settle. He starts towards the building to the right of the blast zone, but hasn’t made it ten metres before it too starts it’s decent towards ground level. He looks to the building next to that, which appears free of flames and relatively stable. There’s no one fleeing from the front door, no one trying to get back into the building to rescue people or things left behind. He wracks his brain, but doesn’t remember seeing any mass evacuation in this area, from either side of the street. He wants to believe that most of these buildings have been standing empty for a while, and a couple of them certainly have, but Bruce’s stomach is twisting with an uncomfortable mixture of guilt and rage. He was looking for all the wrong things, how could he have missed something so big?

He’s not going to think about rooms full of people, gassed by The Joker until their smiles turned to grimaces and they died laughing. Bruce can play that game later, when the culprit has been caught. His ears are still ringing from the initial explosion, but he’s sure that the emergency services are taking too long. It’s probably going to take a while for a fire engine to get down to this end of the city, but the chances of their not being any GCPD out in this area are minimal. He calls up his direct line to Jim Gordon, hoping to emphasise the need for immediate assistance even if he can’t hear anything in response.

But the line is dead, the whole communications system, in fact, appears to be down. Bruce tries the line to the Batcave, tries Nightwing, Batgirl, Batwing. But the call never gets through. He tries to bring up the diagnostics panel to get a better read on the problem, but whatever’s affecting his communications has cut him off from his computer network and he is left with what few functions the suit can manage on its own.

It’s not like that’s anything new. As Batman, Bruce finds himself chasing rats into high altitude, deep ocean and steel bunker, often with nothing but his fists and his wits for comfort. That doesn’t stop the wave of cold dread that washes over him before he can collect himself. Going out of service range on purpose is one thing, having someone change the service range is quite another. Whatever’s causing this, he’s going to have to have a word with Tim about magnifying the sensitivity of the Batsuit receivers.

The problem with the suit prompts Bruce to pay closer attention to the electronics in the area at hand. The lights are out in every building for three blocks, but that’s a fairly normal consequence of such a large level explosion. The same can be said for the streetlights, which Bruce now notes are all dark. He knows for a fact that they were working fine the night before, so whether it was the blast or something else that’s caused the blackout it happened here, tonight.

It’s something of a moot point as to whether the electrics of this street are being screwed with in the same way Bruce’s are, but he doesn’t like people messing with his gadgets like that.

Something that would cause a batsuit communications malfunction, blow up a building, and be completely undetectable in standard scans for explosives up to two days prior. Bruce still has no idea what caused the explosion. It’s gnawing on the back of his mind like a particularly insistent tick. If it were anyone else, Scarecrow, Penguin, even Ivy, he could entertain the idea that he was dealing with something outside his usual remit, something he would need to adapt to. But with The Joker it’s more likely to be something terrifyingly obvious, modified just far enough as to be unanticipated but not so far as to be unpredictable. That’s his trick, his chaos is not a formidable weapon of uncalculated carnage, it is the maladjustment of the normal, twisting the world you think you know just far enough to have you believe you will never feel safe in your own skin ever again.

There’s poison in the water, drink it and you die. You mix the wrong makeup with the wrong perfume, you’re going to die. He finds you in your home and decides that it belongs to him now, he goes to town with the kitchen knives and you die. He blows up a block on the edge of Gotham, and no one dies because they’re already all dead.

“You don’t know it’s The Joker,” Bruce scolds himself, lips catching on the plastic edges of the gas mask. He can just about hear his voice echoing through his own skull. It’s the sort of thing Alfred would be saying to him right now, if he were able to contact him, but he doesn’t believe it for a moment. The scent of gasoline is absent from the air and yet he’s sure he can still smell it, mixed with the smell of drugstore lipstick. Not that he’s ever gotten close enough to give him a good sniff, but Bruce knows not to ignore any signs of The Joker’s coming.

With a start, Bruce realises that the crackling of the fire is just within the range of audible. He strains his ears for the sound of sirens and he thinks he might just catch them. They sound far off, but then again the whole world sounds far off right now. The night is muted, and he is standing across from the wreckage of three buildings, unsure of what his next move should be. Nobody screams, or runs, because they are either a dead body already or they got out of their homes in time.

And beneath all that silence and that fire, the popping of asbestos and the shattering of windows, something high and cold cuts across the night. It strikes fear and resolve into Bruce in equal measure, the same way it always does. It’s not light enough to be a chuckle nor manic enough to be a cackle, not sincere enough to be a laugh and not cheerful enough to be a guffaw. It is its own sound entirely, and every time he hears it, he hopes it will be the last.

Bruce looks back up the street the way he came but sees nothing. He glances into the heart of the fire but doesn’t expect anything to emerge from within. He turns to face down the street, downwind, and sees a single, solitary figure. Stripped of features by the glare of the flames, but unmistakeable all the same.

“Joker,” Bruce whispers to himself, an affirmation as much as anything.

The Joker couldn’t have heard him, he’s too far off and there’s too much background noise out here tonight. But still… “me indeed!” he crows. His voice is shattered glass needling at the back of Bruce’s skull.  He sounds so clear, as if the two of them were two meters apart rather than two hundred, “did ya miss me, Batsy?”

Screw the days of useless investigation, screw the explosion, screw the evacuation and the dead bodies. This is what Bruce has been waiting for, the moment the tension really shatters beneath his fingers and The Joker moves from unseen menace to physical threat. His indecision is gone in the blink of an eye, and then he’s running, scaling cars and rubble in his urge to close the distance between the two of them.

The Joker doesn’t move, doesn’t even flinch when Bruce lands within arm’s reach. He’s still laughing the same laugh that’s not quite a laugh, his face split wide by his customary grin. His skin is pale enough for the light from the fire to glance straight off him, throwing the red of his lipstick into sharp contrast until he looks like a pair of lips floating beneath a wild mop of green hair.

He looks the same as ever, the way he always looks when he’s basking in self made chaos. Bruce doesn’t hesitate, using the momentum of his run up to throw his weight behind the fist he aims at The Joker’s head. He’s already revelling in the satisfaction of impact, the sound of bones crunching when they hit home. But at the last second The Joker ducks out of the way, moving faster than is humanly possible.

Bruce goes flying forward, unable to open his hand before he hits the road but throwing out his left arm to springboard off of, flipping back onto his feet and pivoting to face The Joker once again.

He’s faster this time, feinting another blow to the head before bringing up a leg to kick at The Joker’s knees. Again, he misses, The Joker giggling as he vaults Bruce’s leg like it’s jump rope. “Catch me if you can!” he screeches. Bruce flinches against his voice, unpleasant beyond nails on the blackboard.

The Joker avoids another half dozen punches, skips out of the way before he can be tripped, turns too fast for Bruce to get behind him. It’s infuriating enough to make Bruce careless, so that when The Joker finally decides that he might want to have a go at this game himself, he walks right into a fist to the gut.

He always forgets how strong The Joker is, because The Joker looks like he should weigh a hundred pounds soaking wet. He’s a tall, stringy thing and the suits he wears are cut close enough to his ribcage to leave no room for misconceptions to the contrary. Bruce stumbles back from the force of the hit, not hard enough to do him any real damage through the suit’s armour but strong enough to wind. He tries to maintain composure, cover his blind spots, “what’s your game, Joker?”

“Game? You must have me confused with Eddie,” The Joker laughs, “really darling, you ought to know me better by now.”

“I know you’re a piece of shit,” Bruce grunts, lurching forward and swinging his left fist wide enough that he knows instantaneously it’s not going to hit home.

The Joker skips out of the way of the punch and gasps in mock outrage, “that’s no way to talk to me, lamb chop.”

“Shut up, Joker.”

“And not that I don’t appreciate the invitation to dance but you really need to work on your moves.”

“I said shut up!” Bruce catches a moment of uncertainty in The Joker’s eyes as he straightens up and lunges for his neck. He still misses, but there are a few strands of lime green hair caught between his fingers when he’s done.

He has no time to redouble his efforts before he received a sharp tap to the back of his neck, knocking him forwards just far enough that The Joker can land a kick squarely on his arse. Bruce stumbles but doesn’t fall, swinging round hard enough to catch The Joker’s arm before it can come down on his head.

The arm he catches is holding something, something heavy and metallic that would no doubt cause quite a bit of damage if it hit home. Bruce doesn’t spare it long enough of a glance to put a name to it, twisting The Joker’s arm until he yelps and follows the movement through far enough to break free. The object is thrown into the other hand and hits down hard on Bruce’s thigh. It feels like a crowbar.

Bruce pulls back far enough to scale a pile of rubble lying just outside the radius of the fight. He leaps off it, spreading out his cape and praying that the heat from the fire will carry him far enough to land on The Joker’s head. No sooner is he in the air than The Joker reaches into a suit pocket and throws some sort of powder into the air. He clicks his fingers and it explodes, throwing Bruce high into the air and no doubt carving a fresh hole in the tarmac.

There’s a moment after a steep ascent when you have to come down. The G Force acting on your body effectively leaves you at zero gravity for a split second and it feels like your stomach has been temporarily removed. It’s a sensation Bruce is intimately familiar with, which is not to say he doesn’t hate it. The blast takes him by surprise, and it’s an effort to maintain control of the cape as he is sent rushing high above the street. The jerk of weightlessness makes him want to puke when it hits him, and the descent back to ground level is painfully slow.

The one advantage of the venture skywards is a clearer picture of the surrounding area. He can’t see far enough to tell what’s happening beyond this one street, but he sees that other buildings have been blown at either end, effectively blocking access until they can get a digger on site to clear the debris. That explains why the GCPD have been so slow on the scene. There are crowds of people gathered around the rubble piles where they have been brought up short having escaped their homes. It doesn’t look like anything else is in danger of collapse, but The Joker has been known to change his mind about exactly how much of a scene he wants to cause in the past.

In theory, Bruce knows that an area so perfectly closed off would require The Joker to have been in the area from before the explosion. In practice, he’s long since stopped questioning how his nemesis manages to get where he goes in the time it takes to blink. He has his own methods for vanishing when people’s backs are turned, but The Joker could pull a teleporter from his pocket and Bruce would be entirely unsurprised.

He’s expecting The Joker to have used the exploding powder as a distraction to slip away, but as he comes into land Bruce can make out the green of his hair shining bright through the orange light of the fire. For a moment he is an observer, then his quarry shifts, eyes locking with his and following him down as the cape is drawn in and Bruce’s feet once again make contact with solid ground.

There’s a hole in the middle of the road that wasn’t there before, and The Joker doesn’t appear to have so much as a scorched eyebrow from the blast. He grins at Bruce, unmoving, like he’s got this all planned out and is now waiting for the next step to be fulfilled.

Except The Joker doesn’t plan for anything, not intentionally. He has vague ideas and a seemingly endless number of goons willing to do his dirty work, so that when inspiration hits it’s the work of a moment to see it through. Bruce kicks himself internally, because that’s what he’s been forgetting for the past two days. He smelt gasoline and lipstick and thought something was afoot, but by then The Joker had already filled these buildings with dead bodies, only returning because Bruce was in no rush to chase him into open ground.

“That’s the stuff you used to blow the building.” Bruce says. He’s not looking for clarification, but The Joker still nods enthusiastically in response, smile growing, if possible, even wider.

“But of course, Bats! Custard powder, my own secret recipe. It always goes down a treat, or is that the building?” he dissolves into a peal of laughter, slapping his thigh and dislodging a small cloud of the powder left on the fingertips of his glove.

Bruce flinches away, ready for the stuff to explode while The Joker’s distracted. The only effect his caution seems to have is to prompt another fit of giggles.

Logically, this would be the time to take The Joker down. To pounce on him and grind his face into the tarmac until he lay still enough to be moved to Arkham. Bruce’s fingers itch to grab hold of him, but he knows he needs to wait for a better opening than this. This is The Joker practically begging him to try it, he’s not going to make the same mistake twice tonight.

“And the communications blackout?” Bruce prompts.

The Joker’s still laughing, but his eyes grow sharp. “It’s like I said, hon. Secret recipe. You- hahahaha- you mix the right metals in with this stuff, give ‘em a dose off the mains and poof! You can do just about anything. S’why I never much cared for all those silly gadgets, chemicals are so much more reliable.”

Out of the mismatched soundscape of the night, the cry of a fire engine siren begins to ride high in the mix. Bruce feels a mixture of relief and trepidation at the sound, glad that the emergency services have finally managed to get themselves on the ground and very much aware that he needs to deal with The Joker before they get through the rubble currently blocking their access to the fire.

The Joker notices the sound too, drawing himself to his full height and standing to attention like a meercat. Bruce always remembers that he’s tall, but he never remembers just how tall until he’s uncurled all his kinks and straightened out his spine. In Batman’s thick soled boots, there’s not much in it between the two of them, but The Joker must stand a good three inches taller than him out of uniform. He’s all long lines, a sweeping elegance that’s easily lost beneath the sharp corners of his smile and his body count.

Just for a moment, the sound of the outside world intruding on his private patch of chaos distracts The Joker. His eyes fixed on something out amongst the smoke. Bruce sees an opening, and doubts he’s going to get a better shot than this all night. He moves quickly, not bothering with fists or fancy tricks. He has to make this count. Crossing the distance between them in two great leaps, he brings his leg up and kicks The Joker’s chest with as much force as he can manage.

Even when he’s distracted, it’s not enough to land The Joker on his arse. He flies backwards but his feet land him decidedly upright, momentary shock clouding his face. Bruce flies in to the opening he leaves, delivering an upper cut to The Joker’s jaw and enjoying the grim satisfaction that comes with the crunch of teeth on teeth.

The Joker’s still smiling, even though there’s blood leaking from his gums. Bruce goes to grab him by the lapels before he can slip away, but he misses the ever present flower poking out of the top pocket of The Joker’s jacket. He’s ducking a stream of acid aimed at his face before he remembers, cursing his inattention to detail as strong, spiderlike hands pry his fingers away from the fabric beneath them.

There’s a moment where it looks like The Joker might have lost his balance long enough to actually fall, but wonky science sets him back on his feet, albeit at an odd angle. Bruce snatches at the tails of his jacket and attempts to pull him back in, but The Joker has a hand over his face, pinching at his nose and covering his mouth. In the moment it takes Bruce to shift him far enough to breathe, he’s pulled away again, putting distance between the two of them alarmingly fast.

Bruce dives after him, unsure if he should anticipate a body breaking under his ands or empty air. He misses, just. The Joker laughs like he’s never seen anything funnier in his life, doubling over and clutching at his sides.

With a growl, Bruce starts towards him, confident that this time he can pin him down. Then he notices The Joker’s hands, reaching into his pockets, and all he can think about is the powder, the explosion, the fire still raging behind them.

The powder is airborne before Bruce can do anything to stop him, The Joker’s hands coming up to click. The world has the decency to move into slow motion, allowing him enough time to wonder whether its friction or sound that causes the powder to ignite before he wraps an arm around The Joker’s waist and pushing them both out of the way before their heads are blown off.

He doesn’t turn round to look at the rolling ball of fire he knows is pulsating behind them, just draws his cape up to shield the two of them from the heat and shifts position so he has the Joker pinned between his knees. Regardless of how strong his nemesis is, Bruce knows that he himself is over two hundred pounds of solid muscle, and this skinny rake of a thing is going to have to get creative if he wants to get out from under him.

Of course, getting creative is The Joker’s speciality. Bruce needs to stay on his toes.

The explosion is not nearly large enough to set his ears ringing again. Bruce peers down at his captive, running through possible options for securing him until the police can arrive.

“Oh darling,” The Joker purrs, running his hands up Bruce’s thighs. Bruce grabs them before they get too far, one wrist tight in each gauntlet. The Joker finds this hilarious, and the laughter starts up again. Powerful, full body chuckles that have him twitching on the ground like he’s been electrocuted.

“Hold still,” Bruce snaps, before he remembers that telling The Joker to do anything is useless.

He has handcuffs and rope in his belt, as well as a tranquiliser if needs be though he doubts The Joker’s metabolism will take to it. Drugs roll right off him, or he’s so far gone that they no longer have any effect. Bruce doesn’t carry gaffer tape, which is a shame because it would go a long way towards shutting The Joker up, or at least obscuring his mouth so Bruce doesn’t have to keep wondering if that lipstick smells the way he imagines it does.

The sound of sirens has multiplied. Soon enough the area will be flooded with people. The Joker tries to twist his hands free and Bruce forces them to the ground, either side of his head. Like this, there’s less room for error when restraining him, and like this he can lean over The Joker, facing him eye to eye.

The Joker’s hips cant up into the fraction of space they are allowed by Bruce’s altered position. It’s impossible to tell if it’s supposed to be a sexual thing or if he’s just trying to see if he can shift the weight from his body, and Bruce is not about to ask for clarification. “What’s going on here?” he growls in his best Batman voice, low and dangerous and as intimidating as he’s ever been able to muster.

None of that phases The Joker of course, who manages to pout and giggle simultaneously, “I came to see you, sugar.”

“Don’t play games with me“

“I told you, I don’t play games.” Joker punctuates the sentence with another jerk of his hips, “though I must say, you’re an awful lot of fun.”

Bruce wants to look up, survey the area and see if they’re any closer to having company, but he doesn’t dare take his eyes from his nemesis’ face. “The people in the apartments – you Joker-gassed them. When?”

The Joker shrugs, “how should I know? Yesterday, a week ago. Whatever, point is, you found them.”

“That’s not-“ Bruce is cut off by The Joker’s hips once again rising up to meet his. Slower this time, more deliberate. It’s definitely not an attempt to unseat him. He sorely wants to shift his weight far enough back to stop him, but there’s no way to do so without compromising his restraint on The Joker’s wrists.

He shouldn’t have let himself pause though. When dealing with any criminal, signs of weakness or distraction will cost you dearly, with The Joker you’re lucky if they’re not a death sentence. Bruce curses himself as those hips curl forward again, the long white neck below him tips back to bare unguarded skin and the tip of a tongue darts out across painted lips.

It doesn’t provoke anything in Bruce beyond alarm, the same alarm he always feels at the notion that The Joker sees more in their sparring than dead bodies and manic laughter. The padding in the suit prevents any friction from reaching his groin and instigating unwanted physical reactions, he has to sit there and watch as someone he fundamentally hates takes satisfaction in a position of submission.

“Ya like that Batsy?” The Joker hisses, “I like that.”

“Stop it,” Bruce’s grip tightens over The Joker’s wrists.

Veins in his neck straining at the effort from the uncomfortable angle, The Joker cranes his head forward, up into Bruce’s personal space. He’s still too far away to smell lipstick on him, “Well, what are you gonna do about it?”

Bruce is going to wrap him up like Christmas has come early for the GCPD, and take great pleasure in watching him get shuttled off to Arkham for the umpteenth time. Even though the walls of the asylum can’t hold him, even though The Joker is going to keep coming back as long as there’s a Batman to come back to.

Again, The Joker shifts his hips, and again and again until he’s grinding up against Bruce, eyes wide and excited, laughing all the way. It’s not the first time they’ve wound up in this position, and Bruce can honestly never tell if he actually gets off on it or if it’s just supposed to be unsettling. Knowing what he does about the working of his nemesis’ mind, he wouldn’t be surprised if the intent behind the action oscillates wildly from one to the other.

“If you don’t stop now I’m going to hurt you,” Bruce punctuates the statement by slamming The Joker’s right hand down into the tarmac, enough to produce a flash of pain across the man’s face but not enough to wipe the smile off his face or slow him down.

Threats not followed through are worthless. When it comes to The Joker, most threats that are followed through are of little value at best, but it makes Bruce feel less useless to stick to his word. With the position they’re in, and his reluctance to let go of The Joker’s wrists until he’s very sure he can catch him again before he bolts, there’s only one way to see things through.

Bruce pulls back as far as he can, then delivers a head-butt directly to The Joker’s forehead. For most of the criminals he faces, it’s more than enough to knock them unconscious. But the criminal he’s currently dealing with barely flinches beyond a gasp that could just as easily be pleasure as pain. There are still hips rising up to meet his, insistent and obscene.

He doesn’t move away fast enough, holds position with their foreheads pressed to one another. The Joker’s eyes find his, hungry and wild and his breath smells like popcorn. Everything else smells like gasoline and cheap lipstick, clinging to the inside of Bruce’s nose. He wants to drink it in, peel it back and uncover all the clues he’s ever missed, the feel of crime scenes long blown to smithereens that he knew were off but never had the words to describe.

It’s embarrassing how quickly Bruce forgets himself. But the world shrinks around him, till this is the only problem he has to deal with and when he views it from the right angle, this isn’t really a problem at all.

When he’s looking back on this moment later that evening, from the comfort of the batcave, he will almost convince himself that this was just his mind playing tricks on him, that he forgot himself for a moment and the worst case scenario flooded in to fill the waiting gap. The truth is that The Joker pushes up hard against him, makes a noise halfway between a laugh and a groan, and Bruce pushes back.

Just once. His hips meeting The Joker’s in the middle. He can’t feel anything where it counts, but the sensation of bodies moving against each other stirs something in him, hitches his breath, shifts his concentration.

That’s all it takes. The Joker’s eyes sharpen instantaneously, and with a great contortion of muscles his bends his arms almost all the way backwards, rising onto all fours still on his back and shucking Bruce off like its nothing. The sound of his laugh echoes hollow in Bruce’s ears as he scrambles to regain purchase on his captive, stumbling to his feet and reaching out to grab at stray limbs and fabric.

The Joker is very fast, and very strong, and it’s debateable whether anyone can actually hold him against his will. First Bruce sees him, just a few feet away, laughing wildly as the flickering light of the fire casts shifting shadows across his smile. Then the world appears to break into a series of frames from an old film, seconds apart from one another and missing ninety percent of the action. Bruce steps forward to have another go at pinning him down but The Joker is half way up the street, then he blinks and he’s gone altogether.

The laughter stays though, as loud as if The Joker were standing just behind him. Bruce has allowed Batman to be made a fool of too many times tonight, he doesn’t turn around to be sure he is alone, because he already knows he is. His instincts have always served him better with this foe than his eyes.

His mind is still running through plans of attack, weighing up the options of cuffs vs rope. Bruce could kick himself, for never being fast enough, for knowing The Joker so well that The Joker knows him right back. He supposes he should count himself lucky that whatever electronic component was included in the explosive powder had blocked his communications. Explaining this to Alfred is going to be hard enough without the butler having access to incriminating evidence.

The powder. Even when dealing with Joker weapons he’s seen a hundred times before, Bruce always tries to collect samples. It’s surprising how far the recipes can be twisted while still producing the desired result. He’s long since given up speculation on who The Joker was before he fell in a vat of chemicals and was born into the world, but he’s pretty sure that if he ever stumbles upon the answer to that particular mystery, there’s going to be a Chemistry PhD involved.

There’s a light dusting of something that looks like yellow powder as far as Bruce can tell from the light of the fire, smeared across his knees. He remembers The Joker’s hands, finding purchase and moving higher, how he definitively did not let him get away with it. Bruce is going to hold on to that memory. For now, he opens the duct for sample collection in his left gauntlet and scrapes some of it off. Without leads on The Joker’s next target, he expects he’ll spend the next few days establishing its composition.

A great roar strikes up behind him, like a crowd at a baseball match. Bruce swings round and sees figures starting to emerge through the fog, wearing hardhats and carrying hoses. They must have managed to bridge the rubble. A handful of the firefighters spot him, and for all the time he is there their attention is on anything but the fire.

“Batman!” One of them shouts.

“Put out that fire!” Bruce bellows in response. They jump to it, struggling to stretch their hoses as far as they can possibly go, which is just far enough to make it to the blaze. It will be a while before they move enough broken brick to let a whole engine through, but in the meantime, space for firefighters means space for the people trapped by the rubble to get away from the fire.

He debates staying around to help, waiting for Jim Gordon to arrive on the scene so he can brief him on what he knows. Bruce could tell him that everyone who died here died several days ago, that this was the work of The Joker, that he’s not going to let him get away with this. It would be a courtesy more than anything, there’s nothing he can tell the GCPD that they won’t be able to work out for themselves, and in the meantime, he could be breaking down the composition of this powder and trying to work out where The Joker will strike next.

Tracking by the scent of gasoline and cheap lipstick. Bruce doesn’t want to think about it, he wants to focus on the case at hand. He finds his grappling gun exactly where he left it at the back of his utility belt, which isn’t a given after encounters with The Joker. Across the street from the fire, there are sturdy buildings with excellent grip available to him. It takes all of ten seconds to pull himself up onto a rooftop, and then he’s crossing the city, back to the alley where he parked the batmobile. Away from the fire, the city is dark, save for the glittering lights of downtown in the distance.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This really isn't my best work but OH WELL it has been sitting on my computer long enough and doesn't seem to want to improve. 
> 
> Comments are love. Come find me on [tumblr](http://jeffersonhairpie.tumblr.com/) and [twitter ](https://twitter.com/chadfuture_)


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